How many bats are left? How many are still within this team's aim of acquiring?

I should get the sense that it's one. Morning to you. Good morning i'm dan k k vatsburgh sports this is

daily shot of pirates brought to you by our friends at the north shore tavern comes your way bright

and early every weekday if you're into football and or hockey i also offer daily shots of steelers

and penguins in the same place that you found this. The weekend acquisition of Brandon Lau as part of a three-team trade that also involved

the raise and the Astros most definitely will add run production to the Pirates lineup.

This past season for Tampa Bay, Lao slash slash 256, 307, 477 with 31 home runs and 83 RBIs. Don't make me share with you the degree

to which almost all of those figures, but especially the last two, would have led the 2025 Pirates.

He's 31. He's in the final year of his contract that pays 11.5 million.

So he's set up right now to be a rental, which isn't ideal when sending out Mike Burroughs,

who can't become a free agent until 2031, but I'll say it

again, Lowe can hit.

Also acquired were Jake Mangum, an outfielder who hits for contact, who can really, really

field, and Mason Montgomery, a hard-throwing lefty who's still a bit raw in terms of command and poise and that sort of thing.

So if the pirates end up spending into the $95 million range, as I'm expecting,

and that parenthetically would represent an increase of around $6 million from last season,

which is why I kept telling

everybody to just kind of cool it regarding all this hype about all this money that they have

since they had that money already from all the payroll that they cut over the course of the

2025 season. The new projection for payroll for 2026 is 82 million. So the difference between

95 million and 82 million is very obviously 13 million. And sure, you can get yourself a hitter for

that. And I feel like they will get themselves a hitter for that. But I don't know where it'll fit on the diamond,

...